Benedetto Marcello

Biography

Marcello is remembered not only as a composer but as a critic of his colleagues. In 1720, in Venice, he published a pamphlet called Il Teatro Alla Moda (The Fashionable Theatre), in which he satirizes the opera of his day. He evidently regarded the plots as too artificial, the scenery and stage machinery as overblown, the singers as ridiculously vain or worse, and he thought that the composers who wrote for this absurd environment were themselves culpable. As to his own compositions, Marcello created the Estro poetico armonica, a eight volume collection of settings for 50 of the Old Testament Psalms. But Marcello never gave his undivided attention to music, either as composer or as critic. He was a member of the Venetian ruling elite, and the pressure of his official duties seems to have been limiting. He was also the brother of Alessandro Marcello, composer of a famous Oboe Concerto in D Minor.